Achievements

Hero's Chronicles

Day 1: I Am Born

Woke up today. Ordinarily that wouldn’t seem so odd, but it had never happened before. Left the temple with a vague notion of doing heroic deeds. In the street, I encountered a kind-looking man and asked him where I had come from. He started to tell me a story that began “When a man loves a woman very much…” but, seeing my bafflement, he cut the story short, then winked, complimented me on my shoes, and asked for my phone number. Odd.

Day 2: Alcohol

After a hard day of killing monsters, returned to Godville, sold the monsters’ treasures, and then visited something called a “pub”. I don’t remember anything after that point, but I woke up with an awful headache, dried vomit on my shoes, and my hand clenched around a matchbook sporting my own phone number.

Days 3-4: The Daily Grind

More monsters. Kill, loot, kill, loot, heal, sell, drink, pray. The monotony is broken only by the occasional mysterious materialization of a gold brick, which I carefully store in a Gold Brick Safe Deposit Box. I don’t really see the point, but they say everyone is doing it, and everyone couldn’t be wrong, could they?

Day 5: Loneliness

I’m fairly sure I need to meet a man, but I’m not sure how to do that. I’ll go to the pub and ask: when I’m drunk, everyone around me is so smart, and I’m sure some of them will have the answer.

Day 6: Loneliness, Pt. 2

No answer yet, but the next night I went back to the same pub and found my phone number written on every matchbox in the place, in my own handwriting. Apparently my math isn’t so good when I’m drinking: one of the digits was wrong. That must be why no one has called.

Day 7: Desperation

Wrote my phone number on every matchbook in the pub before I was completely drunk this time, just to make sure I had the digits right. Still no calls. It’s so depressing, it makes a girl want to perform violent acts….Oh, right, that’s what I’m supposed to be doing anyway. Off to kill monsters.

Day 8: Guild Name

Gave up on normal society and joined Guild Name. I already had friends there, but what really won me over was the cheese plates at their parties.

Day 9: Monsters, Monsters, More Monsters

Kill, kill, kill—this is so repetitive that, if it weren’t for my uncontrollable violent urges, I’d become a pacifist. Bored, I started offering the less unattractive monsters my phone number. Still no luck: a Silent Knight winked at me, but I couldn’t get him to tell me his name, so i had to kill him instead.

Also, developed a craving for candy.

Days 10-11: Candy

Mmmm…candy. Must…have…chocolate. Tracked down and killed a Rainbow Unicorn after hearing a rumor that he was carrying a family-sized box of Belgian chocolate-covered truffles. He wasn’t, but I hate Rainbow Unicorns anyway, so good riddance.

Day 12: Irony

10:27 Fighting the Bash Ogre is the closest I’ve been to anyone since my last relationship. So alone.

10:24 I was defeated by the Chocolate Elemental, but I convinced it that there wouldn’t be any honor in killing me, so it let me escape. What a fool.

Sigh.

Day 15: Rob

Met a cute guy named Rob on the road just outside Tradeburg today. Things being what they are when a girl meets a boy, one thing led to another, and I beat the crap out of him, took his money, and helped myself to his healing potion, which by that point I needed. I really wanted to ask him out on a date after that, but he was too unconscious, so I just cut off a lock his hair instead. I was planning to treasure it as a keepsake, but then a trader offered me 2309 coins for it, and, well, you can’t melt gold coins out of unrequited love, or, for that matter, use it to buy beer, or candy.

On another note, I’m now virtuous. Maybe that’s why I can’t meet anyone: boys only like “bad girls”.

Day 27: Stalkers

I was walking along today, looking for things to kill, when I noticed my name carved with my friend She Image’s inside a heart on the side of a tree. And then, a couple of hours later, the same thing again, only this time it was my friend Dumbut. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m lonely and desperate. In fact, I do it all the time, to complete strangers, especially when I’m drunk. But a girl should have standards in theory at least, and that means that her significant others should tell her when she’s in a relationship. I don’t think She Image is even that kind of a girl, and I suspect that Dumbut might have been responsible for both carvings, with the first being the product of his wishful thinking.

At any rate, neither one of them has given me any candy, so screw that.

Day 30: Virtuousness and Righteousness

The past couple of days, I’ve been slipping from virtuous to righteous a lot, and I’ve actually been righteous all day today. Whenever I’m righteous instead of virtuous, I start to get this tingling urge to kill things. No, wait, that’s a lie: I always want to kill things. The difference is, when I’m virtuous, I kill for the love of my fellow humanity, to rid the world of evil monsters, and for the challenge of the hunt; when I’m righteous, a little part of me enjoys beating the life out of one of nature’s creatures. That worries me a little bit—but less so after five or six drinks.

Month 2, Entry 1: Missing Days

It’s been pointed out that there are a lot of days missing from my chronicles. Well, I don’t know why that should bother anyone: not every day has something exciting happen. Anyway, I’m sure I’m not the only one around here who blacks out for several days at a time. Am I right?

So…from now on, my chronicles will be numbered by the month, rather than by the day, to avoid any confusion.

Month 2, Entry 2: Buns

09:30 A guardsman caught me writing “Guild Name <3 my buns!” on a wall. Had to pay a fine of 84 coins.

Oops. I suppose truth is no defense, huh?

Oh…the guardsman also said something strange: he said that things would be a lot funnier if I knew what “bun” meant in Russian. Please…I barely know English.

Month 3, Entry 1: Pets vs. Men

For some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to put a collar on a monster I was about to kill, then scritch his chin and feed him treats. Finally, I have a companion who wants to be around me even when neither of us is drunk, and I have to admit, this has touched my heart. Yes, I still want a man to call my own…or just call me, for that matter…but having Oy, this dear, sweet, fluffy little Rocky Raccoon, has made me start to wonder whether a pet can possibly take the place of a man. After having him for nearly a month, I’ve come to some conclusions.

The first thing that impressed me about Oy was how much help he gives me whenever I’m wounded in a fight: he always comes to me and gently licks my wounds until I’m feeling better. After a while, though, I realized I wasn’t healing any faster than I did when I just plopped down under a tree by myself in the old days. In other words, Oy just licks me a few times and then claims credit for something that would have happened even if he weren’t there—which, come to think of it, is about the same thing I could expect from a man, so they’re even on that score.

I’ve heard that some pets fight right alongside their owners. Not Oy: no, most of the time he just lies there playing with a toy while he watches me do all the work, like it’s some kind of free live theater, and then he expects me to feed him afterwards. Occasionally, he gets up long enough to prove he’s not completely useless, by stepping in and tickling a monster, or boring one to sleep after it’s already at the point of death, but otherwise he’s not a lot of help. Again, though, I could probably expect roughly the same thing from a man, so once again it’s a tie.

I noticed early on that Oy was often playing with some artifact that I hadn’t given him, or even ever seen before for that matter. Eventually, I figured out that Oy was stealing trophies off the corpses of the monsters I’d just killed—not all the time, but enough to take vital beer and Raccoon Chow money out of my pocket. On the other hand, I had this girlfriend whose fiance used to steal money from her purse to blow on who knows what, so maybe Oy isn’t that bad, comparatively speaking.

So what’s the verdict? Well, Oy may be useless, but at least he’s cute and fuzzy, and he keeps me warm at night, except when he’s rooting through the neighbors’ trashcans in the alley. I’m not sure he’s actually better than a man, but he’s not much worse, either.